NEW YORK, NY.- For choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, the past two years have brought an uncomfortable intermingling of life and art. Known for ballets that combine wit with an almost surrealistic imagination, he has found his thoughts drawn insistently toward the war in Ukraine, the country where he spent his early years and began his dancing career, where he met his wife and where their families still live.

“My parents in Kyiv are awoken at night by explosions,” he said in an interview at Lincoln Center. “It gets harder and harder and heavier because no one sees any light. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

There is one image in particular that he can’t get out of his mind — a photograph of a father kneeling next to his 13-year-old son, killed at a bus stop in Kharkiv during a Russian airstrike. The man stayed there for hours holding the boy’s hand.

Ratmansky, 55, has kept the image filed away, part of a mental gallery of the horrors of war. Now it has found its way into a dance, his first for New York City Ballet in his new role as artist in residence. The piece, “Solitude,” set to music by Gustav Mahler, premieres Thursday.

“I didn’t plan to do a ballet about this picture, but it haunts me,” said Ratmansky, who has a son in his 20s. “To convey something so dark in pointe shoes, with pirouettes and partnering — it almost feels like I’m entering forbidden territory.”

It seems right that Ratmansky, arguably the most important ballet choreographer working today, is entering that territory at New York City Ballet, where he has made some of his most personal and original work, tapping into the furthest reaches of his imagination. Because of the company’s repertory, built on the ballets of George Balanchine, and because of the dancers’ ethic — “it’s about the choreography and the music, not about them,” he said — he feels an open-endedness in the creation process here. “I can say, let’s go in this direction,” he said, “and I know that something will happen.”

The feeling is mutual. Wendy Whelan, City Ballet’s associate artistic director, who first met Ratmansky in 2006 when she was one of the company’s star dancers, said that “having him in the company after knowing him as an artist, it feels like we have a diamond in our toolbox, something to care for and protect and keep safe.”

Ratmansky has a long-standing interest in the company, co-founded by the Russian-born Balanchine, who altered the look and feel of ballet in the 20th century. But Ratmansky’s arrival at City Ballet was not a foregone conclusion. And it didn’t happen in a straight line.

He first caught a glimpse of the company as a ballet student in Moscow in the 1980s, when a teacher passed on a videocassette of Balanchine’s “Apollo,” danced by Peter Martins and Suzanne Farrell. Ratmansky had the feeling of seeing something forbidden and new. In Soviet times, Balanchine, who left Russia for the West in the 1920s, was not part of the official ballet training. “It made a huge impression,” Ratmansky has said of the video, particularly in its pared-down style and the simplicity of presentation.

Determined to understand the style better, he taught himself the steps to another Balanchine ballet, “Tarantella,” from a videocassette. He danced it at a competition in Moscow, which he won.

In Canada, where he moved in 1992, just after the end of the Soviet Union made such moves possible, he was able to work with former City Ballet dancers who helped him acquire Balanchine’s streamlined, stylized modern approach to ballet’s 19th-century vocabulary, characterized by speed and keen musicality. His favorite thing to dance became Balanchine’s “Square Dance.”

“I loved the feeling that you could just ignore everything and be connected to the music,” he has said. “It was quiet, like meditating onstage. That was a discovery for me.”

Drawn to City Ballet’s repertory, he auditioned twice for the company, in 1993 and ’94, during summers off from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. He didn’t get in.

Ratmansky began playing with the nuances of the music even as a student and has a great love for the classical vocabulary. He was so attracted to Balanchine’s approach because it represents “a complete system, a very, very beautiful classical system,” he said. “The steps, the musicality. It combines many things. I think what is most important for me is the connection with the music.”

He was also drawn to the way the company’s dancers performed, their sharpness and attack, and the way the technique extended the lines of the body. “Because of the school, and because of the Balanchine technique, the City Ballet dancers shape the material in a very specific way,” he said. “They have certain tools that color everything they do.”

After those City Ballet auditions in the ’90s that went nowhere, there was a moment, in 2008, when it seemed that Ratmansky might join the company as a choreographer in residence. By then, he had become well known as a dance maker and as the director of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, a job he began when he was 35.

He tried to lead the Bolshoi to a new repertoire and more contemporary way of working. It was not easy. At the end of his turbulent tenure, tired of conflict, he entered talks with City Ballet, where he had already made a work, “Russian Seasons” (2006). But those negotiations fell through, and he accepted an offer from American Ballet Theatre instead.

The ensuing years were a period of rapid growth for Ratmansky. Besides the 18 ballets he created for Ballet Theatre, he made works for companies around the world at a feverish pace, including small, poetic ensemble pieces; elaborate, tongue-in-cheek story ballets; and, beginning in 2014, detailed, historically informed stagings of 19th-century ballets that involved the study of period dance notations. (He is a student of ballet history.)

But he never stopped working at City Ballet, creating six ballets for the company, including “Concerto DSCH” (2008), “Namouna, a Grand Divertissement” (2010) and “Voices” (2020), that had a different flavor from those he made elsewhere — often more abstract, wilder, stranger, fleeter.

Now, after almost 14 years at Ballet Theatre, he has finally joined City Ballet, in its 75th anniversary season, as artist in residence, alongside the choreographer in residence, Justin Peck, who is also the company’s artistic adviser.

“The idea that he might come to us was very exciting,” Whelan said of Ratmansky. “Especially for the dancers who had worked with him.” Whelan, who took part in the creation of “Russian Seasons,” has said she was transformed by that process. “We were really sorry to lose him then,” she said of 2008, “but now there is a new leadership, and the time and opportunity looked right.”

“It’s a new chapter,” Ratmansky said, for both him and the dancers. “I’m excited to give them material that will help them develop, not just in this work, but through several pieces. To go somewhere together.”

Inevitably, this new chapter is colored by the events in Ukraine. Ratmansky, who has been vocal in his condemnation of Russian aggression, has seen his name removed from the works he created for Russian companies. He and his Ukrainian wife, Tatiana, watch Ukrainian news and scroll through Ukrainian websites that chronicle the deaths of soldiers and civilians and the effects of missile strikes. All the while, life in New York goes on around them as usual. That dissonance makes things feel even more surreal. “Death is all around,” he said, “and here I am, walking around safe. It’s a strange feeling.”

A sense of tragedy piercing through everyday life infuses his new work, “Solitude,” set to two movements of Mahler. The first selection is a funeral march, the second a slow, glistening composition for strings and harp (the “Adagietto”), written as an expression of the composer’s passion for Alma Schindler, who would become his wife.

Mahler’s funerary procession, the setting for the ballet’s first section, moves between a relentless forward drive — set to a minor-key version of the melody from “Frère Jacques” — Klezmer-infused passages inspired by Mahler’s Jewish roots, and more lyrical moments that offer a glimmer of hope. The mood shifts are abrupt. Ratmansky’s corresponding choreography evokes scenes from life, some hopeless, some otherworldly, some almost giddy.

As the father (played in alternate casts by Joseph Gordon and Adrian Danchig-Waring) kneels next to his son (played by a School of American Ballet student), the rest of the cast of 14 enters in units of two or three, performing jagged, angular steps that have them collapsing toward the ground.

“They are like impersonal forces, the embodiment of things that happen,” Ratmansky said. “Or perhaps they are just thoughts running through the father’s head.”

The “Adagietto” music, with its gleaming, fluid lines, introduces a more haunting tone. The man performs a solo, all deep pliés and explosive jumps and movements that stretch as far as the body can go to fill the music. “It’s so simple, but it conveys so much,” Gordon said after a rehearsal. “I can feel the emotions in my body as I do it. I feel like I’m looking into the void.”

Ratmansky is remarkably hands-on in rehearsal, demonstrating the choreography over and over, standing in for partners, placing hands, suggesting minute adjustments until the movement captures the qualities he is looking for. “He throws 15 things at you at one time and keeps getting us to try things and try things, over and over,” said dancer Sara Mearns, who is creating a role, a kind of angel of mercy, in the new ballet. “He can get a dancer to just go beyond their own body.”

Demonstrating a phrase in rehearsal, Ratmansky stretched so far in one direction that gravity took over, causing his body to tilt perilously. “Almost save yourself from falling,” he told the dancers as he took a step, stopping himself midfall. “And use that momentum to transfer your weight.”

The mood during rehearsal was intense. “It’s crazy the atmosphere he creates in there,” Mearns wrote to me afterward. “He keeps everything and everyone so present.” And though the focus was on getting the steps right and achieving a certain quality of movement, the gravity of the ballet’s subject seemed lost on no one, least of all Ratmansky.

“I’ve never seen him be so vulnerable, talking about what he’s processing every day,” Gordon said.

“I think he might have become even a little more daring,” Whelan said when asked how he had evolved in the 18 years since she first worked with him. “I think that with all these changes in the world, he’s broken free.”

Since the war, “I’m different,” Ratmansky said. “I’m very different.” Still, “by nature,” he added, “I’m not a dark person. I’m not moody.” He has a relaxed rapport with the dancers and is still capable of conveying lightness and mischief through his choreography — qualities for which he is known. Just before beginning this project, he created a new “Coppélia” for La Scala in Milan that The New York Times said was notable for its “joyfulness and energy,” as well as its humor. “It was such a joy,” he said. “Another world.”

In the fall, he started teaching a weekly company class at City Ballet, something he had never done before. “It’s new to me, so I had to work hard,” he said. “I was completely drenched in sweat after every class. But it’s interesting, because in class you can work on the qualities you will need later in the studio.”

The City Ballet dancers’ focus and eagerness stimulates Ratmansky to try new things. “I like to give them something that they don’t use as often: more groundedness, more adagio” — slow, drawn-out movement — “maybe bigger volume,” he said. And with it, perhaps, more emotional resonance. “Maybe unconsciously, I push them into a territory that is new for them.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.